Gone yesterday, here today; Atom support back in dev seed

We reported earlier this week that Apple had seemingly dropped support for Intel's Atom processor from the most recent developer seed of Mac OS X 10.6.2, leading some to speculate that Apple did so to thwart some users from running the operating system on non-Apple hardware. We thought that Apple's move wasn't malicious in intent, but more likely related to code optimization. Still, the news left many Netbook users running Snow Leopard fearing the worst. It was truly a "here today, gone tomorrow" scenario.

The source of the news, who was quite surprised that their post received all the attention it did, is now reporting that the most recent build of OS X 10.6.2, 10C535, has seen the rise of Atom support from the ashes like some sort of software phoenix. That's right, everything is back to normal, nothing to see here, everyone can go back to running Mac OS X on their underpowered baby laptop.

The question arises: what happened? The bottom line is that we're not sure, and anyone that claims to be in the know is probably exaggerating the extent of their knowledge unless they work for Apple. At this point we just need to accept that we'll likely never know whether the omission was intentional or not, or what purpose it served. While we welcome Atom support back with open arms, it's important to greet its return with an air of skepticism—it wouldn't surprise any of us if support were gone again in the next build, or completely removed from the final release.